Cloud migrations rarely fail on ambition. Most enterprises begin their shift to Amazon Connect with a clear architectural plan. But projects tend to break down with the systems that organizations assume they can carry over unchanged, until those systems start limiting the benefits the migration was meant to unlock.
The core migration goes live and there’s a sigh of relief. And then Day 2 begins: the phase where teams expect to optimize, automate, and embed AI across customer and agent experiences.
But compliance, especially when it comes to payment regulations, remains stuck in an on-prem mindset.
As Dan Bloy, Regional Director at SequenceShift, explained to CX Today, migration typically starts with mapping existing processes into a new architecture. “They will have a list of existing integrations that they have, and critical business processes [to] map to those integrations.”
The problem is that many teams take a “get live first” approach. “They won’t try and fix everything,” Bloy said.
“They will try to do what’s called ‘land and expand’. They’ll try and migrate the core workflow over, and then set the architecture up so that it can iterate over that solution and then add the additional benefits that the business has been probably wanting for many years.”
That’s where the Day 2 compliance gap begins to show.
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Post-Migration Realities: Where the Real Work Begins
The first phase of an Amazon Connect migration is only part of the journey. What comes next is where businesses expect to unlock real value from automation, AI, reporting, and continuous optimization.
Payment compliance is at the center of this transition and typically falls into one of two categories.
Payments can prevent a migration from going live, particularly in regulated industries or where customer service agents work remotely. In those environments, secure and compliant practices for handling customers’ payment details are essential, and there are risks to a brand’s reputation as well as financial implications to getting it wrong.
In other cases, enterprises decide to tolerate technical debt to move faster. Bloy described those organizations as “probably happy to take that approach and risk into the cloud and then look to resolve that going forward.” But there’s a cost to that decision, Bloy added:
“They’re impacting the business efficiency by doing that and potentially preventing further optimizations with automations going forward.”
That’s the Day 2 problem in a nutshell. Compliance functions as a requirement as well as an architectural choice that can determine whether the migration delivers ongoing value or stalls.
The Misconception: “Our Incumbent Is PCI Compliant, So We’re Covered”
Legacy compliance providers often rely “wrappers,” external systems that sit alongside the contact center rather than inside it. And many enterprises assume that if their existing payment vendor supports PCI compliance, the same solution can simply be “lifted” into the new environment. But this view often ignores where Amazon Connect’s value is headed, Bloy argued.
While an incumbent may take payments in a compliant way, it may not support Amazon Connect AI services, including transcription, generative summarization and agent Al automation.
Once interactions leave Amazon Connect, AI services, analytics, and orchestration lose visibility. The system may remain compliant, but the end-to-end experience inside Connect is disrupted, limiting access to native capabilities.
The issue is how legacy compliance providers operate. Incumbent approaches “will transfer the call off switch into their own telephony provider, in which case, in the cloud world… that really impacts your ability to utilize those Al services,” Bloy said.